For no reason I know of, the thought of endangered species came to mind on Tuesday morning. Then I saw this article and started wondering about synchronicity. Im sure its just coincidence, but the entire story is so improbable that it seems like an April Fools Day joke. I dont even know whether to laugh or cry or howl in rage.

Back in the late 80s/early 90s, the Great Spotted Owl provided employment for way too many environmental activists and caused unemployment for way too many loggers. We were assured that if the logging industry would stop cutting down trees, the Spotted Owls would come back and everything would be fine. That didnt happen.

Replacing junk science with real research, we now realize that the Spotted Owl decline had nothing to do with logging and everything to do with its raptor rival, the Barred Owl. Its bigger and stronger and not so picky about where it nests and hunts. The Spotted Owl cant compete, so it continues to die out.

The reasonable response to this news by the environmental activists would be, Oh, were sorry, we were mistaken. Go ahead and start logging again, and include those 8.6 million acres that we took away from you through the courts. Ha-ha, silly person, youre expecting a reasonable response? Think again, and you would never in a million years come up with the real story.

The real story is that there are plans in the works to save the Spotted Owl at any cost, including killing barred owls. This makes absolutely no sense. Its not like trying to eradicate zebra mussels or protect against Med Flies. The Barred Owl is native to North America, and it is not a pest. Basically they are planning to kill big, strong, beautiful birds who play a vital role in our ecosystem. The government report calls it barred owl management. I call it needless slaughter and animal cruelty.

Heres an alternative plan: let nature take its course. Back off, get out of the forest, let the Spotted Owl and the Barred Owl compete naturally, and may the best raptor win. According to the report, if we take no further action, we will be saving $147.1 million over 30 years that could better be spent on maintaining bridges or upgrading the national power grid (or building bullet trains). Its apparent that the Spotted Owls are going to become extinct anyway, because they cant compete. Hey, its survival of the fittest, right?

This brings me back to the point of my initial thoughts on Tuesday. What is the big problem with the extinction of a species like the Great Spotted Owl? If its replaced by its bigger, stronger cousin the Barred Owl in a process of natural selection, then the forest becomes a better place with not so many rodent pests running around. How many billion dollars will we spend to keep this bird (or any of several oddly-shaped snails or weirdly-colored mice) alive?

“Environmentalism” is not love of or concern for the environment - it is - and always has been - a political movement of the Left. As such, is not truly about nature, but about power, money and control of resources that rightly belong to others.

2
posted on 02/23/2011 1:42:44 PM PST
by andy58-in-nh
(America does not need to be organized: it needs to be liberated.)

“The reasonable response to this news by the environmental activists would be, Oh, were sorry, we were mistaken.”

....oh no, no, no.....the left NEVER has to say it’s sorry...the biggest example in my lifetime was the fact that the Left never apologised for the SE Asian holocaust...it was the Jane Fonda contingent that cheered on the Commies then looked the other way when the purges began over there.

I would think this injunction against logging, ostensibly to protect the Spotted Owl and founded, as we’ve discovered, on fraudulent or irresponsible “science,” constitutes an actionable injury (a “tort” to the legally inclined) against the loggers who were unemployed, the timber concerns who lost millions in profits, and the general public in those regions where the fraud was perpetrated. A class-action lawsuit against the Sierra Club and the other eco-nazis should bankrupt them and reset the bar for those who would terrorize the innocent in the name of their environmental god.

I walked out on my porch late at night a couple of weeks ago, and heard my first barred owl. I have seen them often, but just never heard one making its distinctive sound. Scared the absolute he!! out of me. I didn’t at first realize it was an owl, and I was like, ‘I don’t believe in ghosts, etc., but WHAT is making that weird sound???’

I figured it out, and then just stood there listening to it for a while. They are truly amazing creatures.

“There were lawsuits, and, in 1990, the Northern subspecies of spotted owl came under the Endangered Species Act (two subspecies in other parts of the country were not affected). A sweeping federal court ruling in 1991 closed much of the Northwest woods to logging. By the end of the century, timber harvest on 24 million acres of federal land had dropped 90 percent from its heyday. The spotted owl crystallized the power of the species-protection law. No threatened animal has done more to change how we use land.”

Because the environuts cannot allow themselves to be proven wrong, they will simply do “whatever it takes” to ensure the Spotted Owl survives. I would love to hear the Sierra Club’s justification for offing a bunch of owls to save the right kind of owls. “Animal Farm” and “1984” are tame by comparison to some of what we see and hear everyday now.

"Both barred and spotted owls, along with great gray owls and rufous-legged owls, belong to the genus Strix, medium-sized birds that lack the hornlike tufts of ear feathers common to many other owls. They are so closely related that they sometimes crossbreed, blurring species boundaries and diluting spotted owl genes."

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